My little hobby web site for tracking your luck with a large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion is back!

My previous attempt was Drupal-based, and required an account. I was never very happy with the account requirement, and played with it being a facebook App but ultimately took the site down (described in this blog post). This time there’s no need for an account as it’s Twitter-based. This also helps with the promotional side of things.

I had hoped to partner with the www.rimrollerapp.com – but that Twitter based iPhone App needed a technical update, and for other reasons, it’s now removed from the App Store. It’s too bad, but you don’t need anything beyond a Twitter account to enjoy RimCount.com.

Simply tweet with the tag #RollUpTheRim to have your tweet listed on RimCount.com. The site tracks results posted to Twitter in the format of wins/rims (and unofficially, a few other formats).

You can visit the main page for the latest, the scoreboard for the best and worst ratios rimcount.com/scoreboard. There’s also a rapidly growing list of Twitter users who have tweeted with the hashtag #RollUpTheRim rimcount.com/list

The site is no longer Drupal-based, but some of the PHP from the Drupal module I wrote and the MySQL data structure were migrated to the new site which is otherwise built from scratch.

As many developers have indicated, working with Twitter.com‘s non-standard API is quite a joy. I was able to get things rolling (pun intended) quite quickly based on the simple twitter searches through Twitter’s search service’s RSS feed and looking-up someone’s Twitter details via an XML call is easy too.

The hardest part has been writing the PHP to search a tweet for a ratio. Challenges have gone beyond simply adapting for ratios like “x/x” or “x for x” or “x-x”, etc. My original work only work with ratios under ten, then when I adapted it I had to protect agains numbers that were near by but not part of the ratio. I’m only 90% I’ve stopped mathematically impossible ratios and ratios like “3-3 cups were losers!”. The struggle continues. What I have done, like Twitter.com, I’ve added an option from the admin side to disregard a tweet or twitter user.

If you have a Twitter account please tweet your results with the large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion and check RimCount.com to see how your results compare to others’.